Save sooner rather than later

It is becoming increasingly apparent that the Trumbull County Board of Elections has no interest in inflicting any kind of fiscal discipline on its own, and it will fall to the county commissioners to enforce budgetary restraints on the board.
In May, Ron Knight, the new Republican member of the board, presented a plan for cutting the voting precincts in Trumbull County in half, from 274 to 135 in time for the 2007 elections. The cuts would have saved the board more than 100,000 a year in pay for pollworkers.
Knight had the numbers and comparisons to show that Trumbull County could make those cuts and still have fewer voters in each precinct than some other counties in Ohio.
While we found Knight's proposal intriguing, we had to agree with other board members who suggested that the timetable was too ambitious.
But last week, the board demonstrated that while Knight may be inclined to overreaching, his colleagues won't even make a grab for the low-hanging fruit on the precinct-elimination tree. They rejected out of hand Knight's suggestion that 30 precincts could be eliminated through consolidation.
Knight said he visited 25 precincts on Election Day and saw waiting lines at one precinct while machines sat unused at another precinct voting in the same room. Obviously, voters in that location would be better served if the precincts were combined and those machines put to full use.
Still, Knight's suggestion was rejected. Also rejected was a suggestion by Knight that the board use more part-time seasonal employees rather than hire two full-time workers.
Now, instead of presenting commissioners with a smaller budget request for the coming year, the board is seeking 1.5 million, a 2 percent increase over its 2006 appropriation. Kelly Pallante, elections board director, said a report on possible reductions in precincts will be given to the elections board sometime next year.
The commissioners should tell the board that if it isn't more aggressive in saving taxpayer dollars, sometime soon the dollars aren't going to be there.